Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Storm chaser on rescuing typhoon victims: "You don't think about it, you just go"
Josh Morgerman has documented more than 20 storms, and he raced to the Philippines to get as close to the eye of Typhoon Haiyan as possible. Morgerman tells Bill Whitaker the typhoon was "without a doubt" the worst storm he's ever been through.

Red Cross official describes "complete devastation" in Tacloban
Nichola Jones of the International Red Cross tells Scott Pelley there is "100 percent damage" to buildings and shelter in the city of Tacloban following Typhoon Haiyan. Jones says there is not enough food or water, and survivors are being forced to sleep outside or in the shells of buildings that are still standing.

Saturday, August 03, 2013

SimplyInfo.org member, Dr. Robert Jacobs of the Hiroshima Peace Institute addressed an audience in Kazakhstan to explain the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi and the damage known to have happened before the tsunami. (text transcript below)Version of this video with French subtitles available here http://www.youtube.com/user/kna60French transcript below after the English transcript.

He says (along with others) that the earthquake alone caused the coolant to fail, and started the meltdown even before power loss with the tsunami, and that means every power plant is unsafe in an earthquake area

On March 11, 2011 at 2:46 in the afternoon, a 9.0 earthquake struck about 70 km offshore of Northern Japan. The earthquake shook violently for over ﬁve minutes. Buildings in Tokyo, 373 km away rocked badly, and oil reﬁneries in the Tokyo suburbs caught ﬁre. It was the largest recorded earthquake in Japanese history, and one of the ﬁve largest earthquakes since the beginning of earthquake record keeping began.

These two events, the earthquake and the tsunami, substantially exceeded safety design assumptions for the nuclear power plants. They had been designed to withstand an earthquake of 8.2, and had a seawall built to withstand a tsunami of 5.7 meters. The earthquake that struck on 3/11 was eight times larger than design assumptions, and the tsunami was more than twice as high as the design assumptions. The plant designers had assumed that they built the plant to withstand any earthquake and tsunami that was likely for over a thousand years. These assumptions were wrong.

Fukushima units 1, 2, & 3 were operating at the time of the earthquake. Unit #4 was shut down for routine maintenance and refueling. The three operating plants all experienced total meltdown of their nuclear fuel. Unit 4 lost cooling to its large pool of spent fuel rods, and this fuel experienced signiﬁcant melting as well. All four plants experienced explosions that dispersed radioactive material into the ocean, but also across large areas of Northern Japan, including many parts of Tokyo...

David McNeil and Jake Adelstein interviewed several TEPCO workers who were at the plants when the earthquake and tsunami both hit. They spoke on conditions of anonymity since they still worked for TEPCO at the time. One worker told them: “I personally saw pipes that came apart and I assume that there were many more that had been broken throughout the plant. There’s no doubt that the earthquake did a lot of damage inside the plant.There were deﬁnitely leaking pipes…I also saw that part of the wall of the turbine building for Unit 1 had come away. That crack might have affected thereactor.”

Another worker told them: “the ﬁrst impact (of the earthquake) was so intense you could see the building shaking, the pipes buckling, and within minutes I saw pipes bursting. Some fell off the wall. Others snapped.” The workers were ordered to evacuate the plant, but, says this second worker, “I was severely alarmed because as I was leaving…I could see that several pipes had cracked open, including what I believed were cold water supply pipes. That would mean that the coolant couldn’t get to the reactor core. If you can’t sufﬁciently get the coolant to the core, it melts down.” He told them that as he was headed to his car he could see the walls of the unit 1 building had already started to collapse. He said, “There were holes in them. In the ﬁrst few minutes.”

Another worker reported that, quote: “I was in a building nearby when the earthquake shook. After the second shockwave hit, I heard a loud explosion that was almost deafening. I looked out the window and I could see white smoke coming from reactor one. I thought to myself, ‘this is the end.’”

Pixar’s “Monsters University” Inspired by Cal

Concept art for Pixar’s film “Monsters University,” scheduled for release in June 2013, recently surfaced on the web, and hints of Berkeley seep throughout the drawings. As The Daily Cal reported last September, Pixar visited Cal and other universities, such as Harvard and MIT, for inspiration and research.
Traveling to different places for inspiration and to help build the world in its films is nothing new for Pixar. For “Brave,” the research team visited Scotland; for “Up,” they journeyed to Venezuela; and for “Ratatouille,” they made a voyage to Paris. A quite adventurous job, don’t you think?
See if you can spot the similarities between Monsters University and Berkeley below!

Sather Gate?

See the resemblance?

The Campanile?

The Pixar team has also explored close to home, as

UC BerkeleyAs Pixar is located in Emeryville less than 20 min from the UC Berkeley campus, it's only natural that Cal would get a lot of screen time.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Michael Powell was a student at the University of Minnesota, and was probably the main "troll" advocating for Josh on internet sites. He probably was the only one that maintained the youtube channels including the one impersonating the missing / dead Susan Powell. He committed suicide in Feb 2013 by jumping off a parking ramp in Minneapolis, probably because the police were asking questions about his involvement which makes yet another death after the suicide and murder of Josh and his two sons. Michael wrote an e-mail to People defending his brother, saying he drove 1,000 miles to help. Susan Graves long believed that Michael must have known what happened to Susan, and believes Michael might have been an accomplice. Michael had his Taurus towed far away, and bought sattelite pictures to make sure the car had been destroyed, but cadaver dogs only found indications of a body on his car, which indicates it may have been used to transport the body. After the search in a area outside of Salem Oregon, West Valley police say if no new leads turn up, it may turn into a cold case without a final conclusion.

Police say they have found no trace of missing Utah mother Susan Powell at ...searching a rural Oregon property for her remains, Powell's father said. ... In February 2012, Josh Powell locked a social worker out of his ... is handling the Powell investigation, did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

2 days ago – The search for the body of the Utah mom who went missing in December 2009 still continues.

A West Valley City police spokesman, Sgt. Mike Powell (no relation), would neither confirm nor deny that police now believe Michael Powell buried Susan's body. But he confirms that police may soon reveal more about Susan's disappearance.

...Josh and Michael Powell’s sister, Jennifer Graves, who has publicly shared her suspicions about Josh since early in the case, tells PEOPLE that she always suspected that Michael was at least aware that Josh killed Susan. also suspects he was an accomplice to the murder.

..The West Valley City police department was recently forced to return federal drug-enforcement grant money that it improperly spent on the Powell case – money that may have been used to investigate whether Josh poisoned Susan's pancakes, according to media reports.

..Michael, a Democratic National Convention delegate for President Obama who ran unsuccessfully for a state representative seat in Washington state.

In an email to PEOPLE a month after Susan's disappearance, Michael, a doctoral candidate in cognitive science at the University of Minnesota, ardently defended his "grief-stricken" brother, complained about the "level of integrity" by the media, and suggested police look outside his family for suspects, particularly at a neighbor of Josh and Susan's in West Valley City, Utah. .."As someone who is close to Josh, I know he is hurting because he misses his wife, and my hope for him is that people are understanding of that," Michael Powell told PEOPLE on Jan. 16, 2010. .. he drove 1,000 miles to help Josh after Susan's disappearance because "I am happy to help a family member in need."

Two years after Susan's death, Josh Powell adjusted a $1.5 million insurance policy on his sons to name Michael Powell as a 93 percent beneficiary...

"Michael had his Ford Taurus towed a hundred miles, and then sold it for salvage value because, police think, he had her body in there. Then he hired militaristic satellite photography people to go look at the wrecking yard to see if his car had been completely destroyed, but it wasn't." She adds, "Cadaver dogs came to the tow yard and only indicated on his car, no one else's."

..Utah police repeatedly questioned Michael Powell in Minneapolis. Then, three months ago, Michael Powell jumped from the fifth story of a parking structure,taking his own life. He was 30.

Cox says he and the officers believe Michael Powell "couldn't live with what he'd done, or the police were closing in." But Cox also said it was he who prompted the search in Salem, Ore., based on a tip he received from a confidential source.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

This college as recently as the 1970s was seen as a commuter college, but their SAT scores are up 20 points and in the next batch of colleges after the top 10 (10% admit rate), and the top 30 (20% admit rate) with a 35% admit rate.

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

IBM donated Lego Mindstorm NXT kits and gave them to local high schools in Rochester MN, and had a competition at the Rochester Technical college for elementary up to high school. A lot of these rigs didn't work right, but Henry's worked just fine. These had to ride on a monorail, use an optical sensor to pick up "cargo" and drop them off, and then quickly reprogram to do a slightly different task.

Got this at Fry's as I was looking for something that you could use to use off the shelf batteries to charge my phone, which is a big htc evo-style phone. I thought it was curious that every unit on the pegs was a return, but I figured I would try it anyway. It only charges for a few minutes and then quits.Interesting digital voltage trick to get 4.5V out of 2 1.2v batteries. I did observe it charge from 20 to 30 percent, but then it quits. The unit charges the 2 AA nimh batteries when plugged into the wall. You can feed it other AA batteries chargeable or alkaline as well, though they may not work as well.

Much better solution are big battery packs like lenmar which you charge first or simply carrying extra battery packs and swapping them in if you have a phone which still lets you replace the battery. My HTC Touch Pro 2 goes through 2 batteries a day plus one I keep in charge with even a little bit of email or intenet use.,

How to Charge Any USB Device with AA Batteries – Make Your Own Battery Pack!!!

Posted by gregd1024 on December 23, 2007

I recently had this weird idea to take apart a USB cable, solder the +VCD and ground wires to a “AA” battery holder, slap in some batteries, and see if the contraption would power/charge my cell phone. Well I just tried this, and it worked! Check it out:

And since it takes four 1.5V “AA” batteries outputting six volts total instead of the standard 5V from the phone’s AC adapter, this homemade battery pack charges the phone faster!

I want to tell you how to make your own. It’s really simple. First, you’ll need these supplies (all from Radio Shack):

Wire cutter/stripper.

Four lithium ion AA batteries (Nickel Metal Hydride’s [NiMH] should work good too).

Any cable with a female “4 Pin Mini-USB” or “5 Pin Mini-USB” connector on one end.

Solder and soldering-iron (not shown).

The battery holder needs to carry four “AA” size batteries. Make sure you get a USB cable that you don’t care about because you’ll be destroying it. The wire strippers must do really small gauges (24 – 26 AWG). I would highly recommend using the thickest USB cable you can find or else the internal wires might be too small to strip